Letter.

The mathematical equivalent of a woman's beauty is directly relational to the amount or degree that other women hate her. And you dear, are hated...alot.
I asked you to sleep in the shape of a trench, so that I may know shelter.
-Derrick Brown

Fragments

We seem to live our lives in terms of moments. Fragments of time and thought that stick, like bubble gum to the bottom of our shoes, only to be carried on. These are the pieces we build ourselves around. We navigate through snowstorms and midnight coffee to arrive as self-proclaimed heroes. No crowds to applaud and certainly not too many damsels in distress, but both are merely a side-effect. We have paper shredders and siblings. We have dogs and neighbors who need to borrow a cup of sugar. We have enemies and friends, all in the comfort of a ten block radius. We stand outside doors and listen to unsuspecting parties. We leave dollar bills inside the pages of library books. We pretend to drop a quarter next to the kid and the gumball machine. Maybe he will buy it, enjoy it; and just maybe it will fall and stick to his shoe. Maybe he will learn to love someone someday, become a hero, make late night friends, breathe music and run across open spaces and jump buildings and live in the light, collect fragments like no one has before.

The Things I Carry, Revisited

I wear a thread around my neck, something simple that shows the wear of months and years past. It has seen all that I’ve seen; it keeps my feet planted firmly on the concrete.

I carry the poems of youth who slam their heart out to a small crowd with an electric microphone on a small bland stage in hopes of exciting the mind. I carry the works of Gemini and Rives. They speak in rhythm and rhyme because it frees them, just as it frees me. Poetry can express emotions and paint pictures that I’m confident a video camera could never capture.

I carry a candle that burned through that November night. It was so very cold, but I have never seen people come together like that. In one single motion, we became one single message. This is not how it should be.

I carry coins in that little compartment above the right pants pocket; a strange but also useful habit. I carry intellectual change as well; wishing people would question why it has somehow become un-cool to be confident in your own convictions. As Taylor Mali will tell you, being aware of who you are and being proud of it is not so easy these days.

I carry the secrets of friends and strangers alike. Sometimes the sharp confessionals are planted into me whether I will it or not. These people seek out those who will listen and ask you to answer their questions, caring less about you solving the problem as much as you listening to it. Whether they are secrets of humor or of life changing weight, I keep them equally locked away. My trust is given to them to carry.

I carry lists of my responsibilities for that given week. Nothing is better than crossing off everything on a list. I carry all the things I shouldn’t have said, right then, or all the things I wanted to say, you know, that one time. I carry the sun, assembling on these shoulders, it spits from my tongue as not some sort of song or statement of my thoughts but rather a “How are you?’” or a “You dropped this”.

I carry the hope that when it’s your turn to make a decision like whether to laugh at the kid who’s being harassed or to tell the insecure torturers that it’s time to stop, that you can somehow find it in you to choose the lighter of the two choices. Carry that little gold star from kindergarten that means you did something good that day.
Yeah, elementary school art. Those awful pieces of paper mapped with Crayola crayons that your mom still keeps, that’s what I carry. Marble paintings find their place right next to lunchboxes and those blissful days on the tire swings. It doesn’t get much better than that.

I carry a lot of pencils, and a lot of pictures, and a lot of poor grades on German quizzes, but being able to understand family when they switch mid-sentence into a foreign tongue is nothing less than priceless. What I carry, in these pockets and mind, is nothing less than priceless.

Love Swings and Mood Rings

You’re cold most of the time
But I just let my fingers find
Cracks in your freezing lines

Broken minds and fractured times
Letting the chilled air move through these forest pines
It’s how I sleep at night
The calmness of your breathe
Brings death to the fear
That was building inside thee
I just want to know if you still like me

Write me a poem, something that rocks and raps
To and fro, breaking the status quo
So I know that you’re still here
Calmly freezing
With me

Sitting in these trees, like children trying to feel bigger than the world will let us be
I wonder how you’re still so cold
Can you save me from the monster that is me?

So bold it’s hot
Hot like stovetops
I fling rocks off rooftops at classroom doorstops
Cus` even the brightest of us feels the pop of a last minute heartthrob

So warm, you feel it right now
Down on the sidewalks
The street talks
Love walks
Silence like pin drops
Childhood giggling like gumdrops

These are the things felt
When everything warms up
When no one cares that you’re not so tough
When things are not so rough, for once

You can breathe air and see clearly, you’re nearly healed
The cold has yielded from view
I love this feeling but what about you?
Is it something you’re still willing to do?
Maybe even till we’re old too?
Am I worth a shot?
Am I worth a shot?
Am I worth a, will you let me be that hot stovetop
Breaking those cold lines that plague your face

Rebuilding our lives
At a turtles pace

Step back

I'm confused
because one plus one is one
and two plus one is five
and I don't know where i'm going to go when I die
the earth tremors beneath me because some didn't like where they ended up
and some didn't like that it got so rough
and I don't blame them.

This world is turning two miles a minute and I see the suns run from me.
It's so slow you could watch a heartbeat,
or watch the strike of lightning

The world is turning into itself and we can't even count the spins.

A breeze and some dust

Almost weekly, as I lay in my bed, I hear the groups of raccoons outside my window fight for the scraps of human food that has been carelessly left out or exposed. They sound as if someone is ripping each nail from their extremities. I feel a need to seek the truth behind these noises, so I silently creep to my windows edge and strain to observe the sources of those noises. In the pitch black, my vision is rarely helpful, but the longer I sit, the stronger my hearing becomes. I sit for what seems like a short amount of time, but then glance back at my clock.

I keep getting lost in what I can't see.